[Music] Archi Hacks - Life Hacks for Students and Architects

Hey welcome back to another portfolio review!  Today we have a very special portfolio - this  

portfolio is a student that is currently  at Harvard GSD so this is a portfolio with  

compilation of six projects done before and after  his graduate study, so some of them are from his  

undergrad study at UC Berkeley and the rest are  done as a part of his curriculum at GSD. And as  

you can see, he has pretty unique drawings and  everything is pretty well laid out, consistent,  

nothing too special in terms of layout, but his  drawings, they always have something special  

about them that makes them stand out. And you  see this is the kind of control and creativity  

one needs to have in order to make it to these top  universities. So let's take a closer look at it.  

So I think one of the recurring patterns about  excellent portfolio is that their covers are  

extremely minimal and again in the table of contents,  only the essential information are shown  

and nothing additional, and we dive right into his first project.

So this full bleed rendering just puts you right into the scene, clear indication that you're entering a new project.  

And this layout is extremely consistent, he starts from  outside in, from the overall context into the  

project and his methodologies about how  he came up with the design, and some physical  

models, physical experiments, I think it's important  that one mixes up both digital and physical  

studies that adds real texture and flavor  to your design and these explain concepts,  

and yeah, overall the drawings are excellent,  even though I feel like the texture could have  

gone a little bit better with the drawing, or even  just a single color could have worked better  

in this situation I think. Yeah, aside from that,  I think the drawings are rather conventional, at  

this level, and you see towards the next projects,  you will see how he improves. But yeah you can  

see there's something about it, this is one of his  first projects at Harvard, and as you can see 

he's adding a lot of interesting twists to it,  for example this is not just an aerial view,  

but this is from someone's window, and not only  that, there are all these papers that  

are flying around, and these papers actually  have some sort of relationship to the actual  

proposal. I think these were excellent touches, I  don't think I've seen that anywhere else before.  

And good old style, these are drawings from classical architects.

And I think there are some of the things that you can learn from these guys  is that certain drawings that are passed down to  

this generation have a sense of power to them, and  by being able to leverage that kind of iconography,  

you are able to harness that level of reverence to your own drawing, and that is almost exactly what he does in this drawing.

Usage of bold colors and geometric shapes,  

something that has been more prevalent  during the times of the modernist masters,   I think that might have helped.

I feel like I can totally imagine seeing these photos from like  

some books from the archive, but apparently these  are actually a part of his design proposal so...

Something very classical about the design and  the representation totally goes hand-in-hand,  

and here he's utilizing oblique perspective and  this unnatural appearance actually used to be  

very popular before computerization of 3d model,  we've actually created a plugin that allows you to  

create this kind of appearance so be sure to check  that out, I'll link it to the top right corner!

Diving into the next project, another full-bleed  page, which is totally different from explanatory pages.

about them gives a sense of absoluteness to  your drawings, so I highly recommend trying  

those kind of representations out. This  can give the audience a sense of interest,  

and make your drawings look a bit more  powerful.  

Yeah I think the line weights 

are not coming out as he intended, but  I'm sure these are flawless drawings.

This drawing could have just been on its  own but he added a little hand and the  

brush painting the windows and obviously the  windows are a big part of this proposal so he's  

really highlighting that and I think this is an  excellent touch.

And for this project there's a  

sense of color scheme going through, most of  the drawings and models are black and white  

but on the parts that he wants to highlight  are in this consistent golden yellow color.

There we go, in this project he's fusing  this mallet to architecture so that's kind  

of interesting, you all done explaining the  concept through not only diagrams but also  

plans and elevation. I think this image used  to be on the cover of the Harvard website or  

something like that, but I think this is a  good demonstration of how he's unafraid of  

turning the whole convention upside down because  he literally just put the rendering upside down  

and shows that the reflection so that the  reflection looks right-side up so I think  

that's pretty interesting. Another project  that seems almost extremely classical, these  

figure-ground studies look extremely interesting.  It's axonometric, they're just purely eye candies.  

And otherwise some very conventional  layouts and rendering collage studies. 

And another more experimental design and  representation of techniques.

Yeah I think there are some recurring patterns in this  portfolio by this point you might have noticed  

that he sets up this kind of establishing view,  and then goes on to explain his projects using  

other conceptual drawings such as figure-ground  or diagrams and then I think every project  

has at least one or more experimental  representation techniques. Very nice.

And then his personal work consists of  photography, and you can see that he has,  

he knows how to compose his photographs.

Yeah they're extremely minimally laid out, only  includes essential information, kind of builds  

character. And going through this portfolio you  can almost get a sense of what kind of person  

he is, even though that might be misleading I  think this portfolio is successful in establishing  

his character and delivering that to the audience,  showing that he is well versed in his art.

Kudos to him, and great work, and let me know if you  guys enjoyed this video, and please let me know  

if you would like me to review some of your  portfolio. And until next time, take care, bye!